Climate change is the most widespread & complex problem humanity has ever faced! There is no time to waste and we need to turn green talk into profound green action. This is the intention of the GREEN TIMES.

Boiling Point

The Ruth First Memorial Lecture: When you tug on a single thing in nature, the conservationist and writer John Muir once wrote, you find it attached to the rest of the world.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the climate crisis. Tugging on a thread of our shared atmosphere in China or the US, by shunting pollution into the skies there, is causing the fabric of local weather patterns to unravel half a world away.

This booklet, the 2007 Ruth First Memorial Lecture and published by the Heinrich Boll Foundation in February 2007, explores the lives of a few ordinary South Africans as climate change sets in: a rooibos tea farmer, a traditional fisherman, a commercial maize farmer, a political refugee and a sangoma. Most live on a knife-edge because of poverty and their dependence on an already capricious natural environment. This story considers what might happen as normal weather trends are amplified in a hotter world.